As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.